Several times over the years, and once very recently, I saw a suggestion that has a feel-good element but that I just can't sign on to. It goes something like this:
- Amend the US Constitution to limit the president to a single (in some versions, six-year) term; and
- Legally provide for automatic, unappealable, mandatory public execution of each president upon expiration of his or her term.
The idea being that no one would run for president for personal profit or self-aggrandizement. Maybe if no one ran at all, one would be conscripted somehow, and the poor doomed soul probably wouldn't be as evil as those who would actually seek the job if it didn't entail the death penalty.
Problem is, I suspect there would still be people running for president -- people to whom that kind of power is so important that they're willing to die for the privilege of exercising it. And those people would likely turn out to be, on average, even worse than the human-shapped shambling bags of excrement we get now.
